He shifted the newspaper downward enough to peer over the top of it in her direction, staring at her through the dark lenses of his sunglasses, but she still couldn't see his eyes. All she could see was her own reflection in the tinted lenses. "Are you waiting for me?"
The man glanced downward, very purposefully and very carefully folding the newspaper which he set on the table at right angles to his silverware directly next to his cup. That accomplished, he gestured with his left hand in the direction of the chair across from him, silently inviting her to join him without raising his eyes. As she perched herself on the wrought iron chair, she thought to herself that this man looked familiar.
All those weeks when she had felt such apprehension, glancing over her shoulder in foreboding, she had checked all the shadows and every corner, certain someone was always following her. Had her trepidation been well-founded after all? Had this man been following her? Had she seen him somewhere before? Or was her nervousness and disquiet simply getting the best of her? Did this man just have one of those faces that you felt sure you recognized?
Aria started to feel some very deep, very real anxiety and did her best to quell it. She waited for him to speak, assuming if everything was on the up-and-up that he had done this kind of thing before, and would take the lead to get them to the next level, whatever that was.
The waitress came back to the table to refill the man's lemonade and Aria ordered a cup of decaf with cream, no sugar, then folded her hands and waited. The man across from her sat up a bit straighter then took a deep breath and finally spoke.
"Hello, Aria." His voice flowed over her like a warm baritone blanket. It was deep and comforting and frighteningly familiar. He removed his sunglasses. Ice blue eyes, almost silver in color, calmly met her glance. Already tense muscles contracted in her stomach and around her heart, stealing the breath from her body and sending a surge of adrenaline that made her palms sweat even though her fingers felt ice cold. Her throat let out a startled gasp as recognition dawned.
It can't be! her mind screamed. It's not possible!
"How've you been?" he asked. "You look even more beautiful than I remember."
Aria didn't know what to say, literally shocked speechless. She had never spoken to a ghost. Her mouth felt so dry that the air coursing in and out of her lungs scorched her throat. Finally, she made an attempt. "What? … How? …"
Nicholas "Nick" Williams leaned forward and spoke very quietly but with great urgency, his low voice pitched for her ears alone. "It's okay, Aria. It's a long story, and I'll be happy to share it with you. But I have to call my superiors in less than twenty minutes, so right now, just show me what you have. We can stroll down memory lane later on, okay?"
Aria finally felt able to speak. She gripped the wrought iron chair handles beneath her fingers until her muscles ached. "You aren't Nick Williams," she announced as she stood. "Nice try, but I buried Nick ten years ago." So many emotions rushed at her: confusion, anger, shock, hurt. What was happening?
Nick crossed his arms and leaned forward. "I know this is a shock, but it's important that we focus on why I'm here. We can catch up later."
"F-f-focus?" She felt heat flood her cheeks. "Focus?"
He visibly sighed a heavy sigh. "I'm sorry to shock you like this, Aria. If I'd known it was you, I might not have even come out. But, we didn't know anything until I was already here. You did a good job of covering your tracks."
A good job? Was he complimenting her?
She closed her eyes and shook her head. This was unimportant in the scheme of what was happening. She opened her eyes and looked at him again. He obviously felt comfortable with the look on her face, because he leaned back and gestured at her with his hand. "Please, talk to me."
"I … "
He reached around the table and laid a warm strong hand over hers. "Aria, please. Listen to me." As he spoke, he rubbed the top of her hand with his thumb, soothing her, calming her racing mind. "Please tell me what you planned to say before you knew it was me."
Aria licked her lips, unsure of where to start. "I'm a nuclear engineer."
He released her hand and leaned back in his chair and raised an eyebrow. "Far cry from your dreams of being a professional musician."
"Yeah, well, a broken wrist will halt a pianist's career quicker than almost anything."
He frowned and looked at the hands she had clutched together on the table. "Broken wrist?"
"Yes, Nick. Broken. So thoroughly that two surgeries couldn't fix it."
"When?"
"When what?"
"When did you break it?"
"I didn't break it."
"I don't understand."
Not knowing what could possibly be motivating her, other than a desire to maybe hurt him the way she had been hurt by him, she said, "I didn't break it. At your funeral, your father broke it."
He froze. There was no other way to describe it. He not only stopped moving, a look of icy steel crossed his face and the anger in his eyes took her breath away. Almost as soon as the anger appeared, it disappeared, and he looked absolutely void of any emotion.
Suddenly, she wanted to take back the words but they couldn't be taken back. She felt sure he would have found out eventually, though she had no reason to tell him so heartlessly. He had nothing to do with his father's actions, then or now, but she certainly implied that she thought so by the way she'd worded it.
"Explain," he bit out.
"No. That isn't why you're here. It's important to focus on why you're here, right? We can catch up later, you said." She leaned back and crossed her arms in a purely defensive manner. "I changed my major. I bounced between math and computers for a while, and finally settled in on engineering. The nuclear part came with my Ph.D."
He still didn't move. She expected him to ask about her getting a Ph.D., maybe even be a little impressed, but he just sat, stony and frozen. She continued. "The company I work for is contracted with NWT. Do you know what that is?"
"Yes," he bit out.
"NWT has a contract with the government to design a nuclear powered suit for astronauts. I head the project, but NWT has an administrative lead who handles all of the nuke side of it. He's our official liaison with DOE and NASA. His name is Peter Harrington."
She paused while the waitress slid a cup of coffee in front of her. She smiled her thanks and took a sip from the cup.
"Go on."
"I started dating Peter several months ago. We're not allowed to bring anything into our facility nor take anything out. They search bags, lunch boxes, purses — everything is open for inspection. Also, we're not allowed to talk about work outside of work. At some point in the last few months, Peter has been pressing me about details in my work. It's a highly competitive contract and we're working for a highly sought after patent. It was annoying that he wouldn't stop trying to get updates from me, and when I wouldn't tell him anything outside of official reports and meetings, he actually got angry."
Nick raised an eyebrow. "Angry how?"
Aria waved a hand. "Not physically. Just emotionally. Impatient, angry, short tempered. He cut a few dates short over it."
She took another sip of coffee, her mouth so dry she could hardly speak. "One day, he was arguing with me about giving him information and he said, 'I just need to know if the shield will prevent detection!' When I asked him what he meant, he insisted he didn't say that. He said what he'd said was, 'prevent infection.' As if to say it should shield the astronaut from radiation exposure."
Nick tilted his head as if to look at her from another angle. "What do you think he meant?"
"At the time, I had no idea. Then I started paying attention. I came to realize that what he meant was, if a nuclear device was being transported in the container I was developing, could it go undetected."
"What kind of nuclear device?"
"I can only assume weaponized."
Nick propped his elbow on the arm of his wrought iron chair and rested his chin on his th
umb, conveying to any casual observer just a relaxed conversation despite their subject matter. "You think Harrington is using your department to create a device that will allow him to create an undetectable man-portable weaponized nuclear bomb?"
"I do. And if I had some way through security, I could prove it. Right now, everything I have is just circumstantial. But I know it."
Nick stayed in the relaxed pose and waved the approaching waitress away. "Circumstantial evidence on something this serious isn't a lot to go on. I need to see what you have so that I know what we're dealing with."
Aria looked at him, inspected his face. He'd aged. He looked tired. A scar ran across his forehead, right at the hair line. Another one ran the length of one side of his chin. He looked hard, unfriendly, until he smiled at the waitress and she acted like he was her best friend in the universe. Then he looked at Aria again, and for a split second, those icy blue eyes looked like they had seen the problems of a lifetime.
"I'd like to know you believe me when I say there's a very serious thing happening here, and that you're not going to blow me off."
He didn't move. It didn't even look like his facial expression changed. Only his voice sounded extremely serious, and she couldn't help but pay attention to every single syllable. "There are exactly three people in this entire world I would trust implicitly. You happen to be one of them."
"That's nice, coming from a man who made me think he was dead for the last decade."
She saw a muscle twitch in his jaw. "Fair enough." He looked at his watch. "I need to call in. Let's go back to your place and finish."
"My place?" Aria waged an internal war with herself. She wanted to bring him back to her house. She wanted to hear about the last ten years, and tell him about hers. She wanted to pretend they were old high school classmates who just happened upon each other at a coffee shop and wanted to catch up.
Instead, she felt like he'd betrayed her. She had mourned him, truly and deeply, and yet here he sat, two feet away from her. Now she didn't know if she wanted him anywhere near her home.
"Yes. Your little cottage by the river about half a mile from here." He stood and tossed some money on the table. "Let's go."
Unwilling to argue with him about it, she sighed in resignation. He clearly knew where she lived. They might as well go there and enjoy a little more privacy than an outdoor cafe. "Lead the way," she said with a tight smile.
For the first time since she approached him, his smile appeared genuine. They walked from the river front into Aria's neighborhood. When they reached her cottage, she used her key to open the door and let him precede her inside.
In the main room, she gestured in the general direction of the fireplace. There, in a cozy circle around a low table, sat a couch the color of the Oregon evergreens accented with cranberry colored pillows and a wing backed chair with wide stripes that matched the sofa and pillows. A large flat screen television hung above the fireplace mantle. She gestured at the couch as she sat in the chair. "Please, have a seat."
"I need to call in first."
He stood there and didn't pull a phone out of a pocket, so she finally said, "Do you need to use a phone?"
"Yes, thanks." She gestured to the end table next to the couch where a cordless extension sat. He picked it up but did not turn it on. He stared at her, clearly waiting for her to leave before making his call.
Not knowing what else to do, she went into the kitchen to get them some drinks. She rested her forehead against the refrigerator door, trying desperately to comprehend the fact that Nick Williams, Special Agent for NISA, was in her living room using her phone. She finally composed herself, opened the refrigerator door, and grabbed two bottled waters. When she turned around, he was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She jumped when she saw him, then squared her shoulders and walked past him. "Did you convince them that I'm not a fake?"
Nick sighed and rubbed the back of his neck, following her back to the front room. "Yeah. I still need to see your proof, but I believe you, which was what they wanted to hear."
"Did you let them know we went to high school together?" she asked, sitting on the chair and twisting open the lid to her bottle.
"No. I want to keep that to myself for now," Nick sat in the center of the couch.
"So you have a little more time than you did back there?" Nick nodded. "Then could you please tell me what is going on?" She could hear the anger in her own voice. "Can you please tell me why I've thought you were dead for a decade?"
Nick shook his head slowly. "Sergeant Nick Williams, United States Army, did die ten years ago in the Iraqi desert."
Aria folded her arms in a defensive gesture. "But he didn't. I'm looking at him."
"No, Aria. He's been dead a long time. I left him there."
Aria leaned back in her chair, her anger leaving her as quickly as it had come, feeling empty and defeated. "What happened?" she asked him in a whisper.
She saw a flash of emotion cross his face before his lips thinned in a tight line. "Our Chinook went down while we were transferring a high level prisoner." He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. "I tried to rescue the pilot and copilot right after the crash and got winged in the forehead by a bullet." He ran his finger over the scar at his hairline. "When I regained consciousness, I thought the only survivors were me, the prisoner, and one very badly wounded government agent. I knew the people who shot us down were coming for us, so I took the prisoner and the agent and we went over a rise and hid. As soon as they were gone, I got us back into the Chinook and gathered what provisions I could and headed back to the base at nightfall."
She had a feeling that he left out a lot of the story. He continued. "We walked at night and hid during the day. By the time we made it back to the base, I discovered the government agent worked for NISA, and he was telling me how I was the perfect candidate for them." He took a drink from his bottle of water. "The rest is history." He shrugged and smiled, "At least, secret history. The world typically never knows what we do."
Aria closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. What would a twenty-year-old have to do with a wounded man and an enemy prisoner in the desert that so deeply impressed a secret government agency? "So what do we do now?" she asked, sensing the end of the conversation about Nick.
"Now I see what you have and what we can do with it," he said. "Show me your evidence."
Aria went to the end table by the couch and opened the drawer. In an envelope between two magazines, she recovered a micro-SD card. She opened the back of her phone, removed the micro-SD card already there, and replaced it with the new one.
"We went to an antiques show on the coast one weekend about two months ago. During an auction, Peter left me and said he'd be right back. I gave him about a minute then followed him. I saw him in the atrium of the hotel talking to these two men." She accessed the picture and pulled it up. "I'm going to assume you know your most wanted. This one is Roj Singh. I never got a picture of the other man, but I did see his face and I would recognize him."
Nick's eyes widened at the name and he looked at the phone. "It's not a clear picture."
"You're right. It's not. But I saw them. This was clearly Roj Singh — one of the top nuclear physicists in the world, who, after writing some pretty scathing and almost threatening articles about the United States, was dismissed from his position at the University of New York and placed on the terror watch list."
"Not possible," Nick said, handing her the phone back. "Roj Singh is dead."
"I know those were the rumors, but I also know him personally. He did a special series of classes when I was in school and I spent eight hours a week for a whole semester in a room with him and forty-nine other people. I'm telling you that's him."
With a frown, Nick shook his head. "I don't know how it's possible. I was there when he was killed in Syria."
"Nevertheless," she said. "That afternoon, I came around a corner and Peter was on the phone. He said, '…that's right, the president, vice pres
ident, speaker, and a good portion of the House. The summit in May is the perfect time to strike.'"
"What did he mean, perfect time?"
"I don't know. I didn't hear any more of the conversation and I certainly didn't ask him to elaborate."
"What else do you have? Surely you didn't contact the FBI because you saw a ghost and overheard half a sentence."
She stood and walked over to the desk and grabbed her laptop, bringing it back to the couch. She sat next to Nick and brought the machine out of hibernation. Very quickly she pulled up the images of the files she'd scanned at her office.
"These are screen shots of my security program on my computer. Whenever someone accesses my files, a log is left telling me whom. My entire team works on the same network, so I had to really look for this, but this number is Peter Harrington's terminal ID, showing when he accessed my files."
Nick leaned closer to her to see the screen. "If he works with you, wouldn't he have access to your computer?"
Aria shook her head. "He doesn't work on the projects I do. He works in the administrative division."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning he makes sure our time cards are turned in correctly, that we stay in strict accordance with OSHA regulations, and he interfaces with DOE and NASA. There is no reason at all he would have a legitimate need to access these files, especially not over and over again." She clicked a few keys on her keyboard and pulled up the scanned documents. "I've highlighted the details of what he looked at and when he looked. He pays strict attention to the pack that the nuclear power will go into."
He nodded. "Okay. This is still all rather circumstantial."
Aria smiled. "Indeed. But, I'm not a government agent. I'm a pianist turned engineer."
Nick cleared his throat and leaned back on the couch. "Abraham Lincoln once said that if you look for the bad in mankind and expect to find it, you will." He tilted his head as if to look at her from another angle. "So, I guess my question to you is, are you looking for something and then finding it, or have you found something that's really there?"
Aria fought an immediate knee-jerk feeling of defensiveness and forced herself to analyze what he'd said. She felt her brows furrow together in a frown. "I think that's a good question. My best answer is, this is a really scary idea and I hope I'm wrong."
An Aria for Nick (Christian Romantic Suspense) (Song of Suspense) Page 9
